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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Review of The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s 2010 The Dervish House is a slow burn—a fuse that smokes rather than
sizzles, culminating in fireworks that are not wondrous for size, rather
subtlety of color.Centered on six lives
connected to a dervish house—an aging 17th century wooden building—in
near-future Istanbul, McDonald builds the story, one historical, cultural,
personal, and technologically innovative block at a time.Nanotechnology and its potential effects in a
culturally tense environment the major premise under examination, The Dervish House is yet another domino
in McDonald’s chorus line of top imaginative and socially conscientious books today.

No fuse can be lit without heat, and The Dervish House opens with a terrorist
attack on one of Istanbul’s trams.Necdet is a young man standing near the bomber when it goes off.He survives the attack, but with head
swirling in an unfixed reality, stumbles away from the destroyed tram.Can is a boy with a heart condition; sudden
noises and scary moments are capable of stopping its beat.The device he wears to dim noise catches the
sound of the bomb, so he sends his robot monkey through the alleys and rooftops
to have a peek.What he sees causes him
to send it scurrying back.Georgios is a
Greek living in the old dervish house.Having been displaced in a cultural purge from the Turkish university
post he occupied many years prior, he lives in isolation, thinking upon what
his life could have been.His days
sitting at tea in front of the house, however, are never the same after the
bomb.

And there are three other main
characters.Adnan is a brash and
brilliant market trader who has a grand idea how to trick the system with an
Iranian gas deal and earn millions in the process.His wife Ayse, who owns an antiquities shop
on the ground floor of the dervish house, also loves challenges, and when
proposed the idea of finding a relic thought extinct—a Mellified Man—her
interest is piqued, and the word-of-mouth hunt through Istanbul’s bazaars and
local color is on.Lastly is Leyla, a
young woman from the country who is trying to make it in Istanbul’s fast-paced
world of marketing.The project she’s
eventually caught up in beyond her imagination’s limits, selling it proves
difficult.Is the world ready for what
she and her partners are developing?

These six lives, as disparate as they
seem, intertwine and run parallel with one another in telling the story of The Dervish House.Both sides of the Bosphorus in play, Istanbul
can be considered a seventh character.McDonald goes into fine but not overbearing detail setting the scenes,
integrating the city as vibrant background into the experiences of the
characters and their histories.The
research obvious, Turkey’s heritage is woven into the story in a way few
writers of sci-fi these days take the time to do.At the crossroads of Europe and Asia—some of
the oldest and most sought after territory in human history—McDonald makes good
use of the setting, much to the reader’s benefit.

Taking the past and present and twisting
ever so slightly to make a future, a wholly plausible version of Istanbul circa
2027 is constructed by McDonald.The
different evolutions of nanotech, for example: Can’s robot, the swarm bots
employed by the police, the use of nanotech in inhalant drugs—both legal and
illegal—is presented in a realistic fashion no author I’ve yet to encounter has
been able, including Stephenson in The Diamond Age.The final extrapolation
McDonald performs with nano (the one left to our imaginations) and its
potential cohabitation with our bodies is just mind-boggling.That the author also ties nanotech to the
miniatures and intricacies of Orthodox, Muslim, Jannish, Hindu, and other
religious objects, imagery, statuaries, and totems is, however, the icing on
the literary cake.Paralleling
ideologies contemporary and pagan with nano, in addition the intricacies of
inter-cultural issues (the troubles integrating Kurds into Turkish society and
silent malice towards the Greeks), McDonald is on top of his game in presenting
a near-future reality that keeps its feet firmly planted in the variety of life
and behavior on Earth today while introducing the potential technology and its
effects for tomorrow.

There are, however, numerous moments
that make The Dervish House feel like
McDonald was trying to back away from the presentation of his more singular style
and write a mainstream novel.Toning
down his prose from the literary pyrotechnics of Hearts, Hands, and Voices and the vivid, visual pacing of River of Gods, The Dervish
House is more evenly paced and readily comprehensible; rather than allusion
and metaphor, meaning is most often stated directly.Along with a style that effectively repeats
words and phrases for emphasis, McDonald also utilizes a few well-worn plot
devices. The hunt Ayse goes on will be
familiar to fans of Indiana Jones, as
will her husband’s wheeling and dealing to net the sweetest deal to any person
familiar with stories of golden boys on the stock exchange.The outcomes of these two sub-stories
likewise strain the limits of believability, as well as draw questions about
their overall relevance to the plot.It
should clearly be stated, however, that McDonald presents these rather clichéd
elements in his own voice, making them at least bearable.Given his track record with critics compared
to popular opinion, writing a story more accessible without sacrificing heart
can be forgiven.

In the end, The Dervish House is a continuation of McDonald’s run at writing
books that are lyrically mature, sci-fi in scope, and socio-culturally relevant
in detail.Though more readily accessible
given the style in which it is written, the underlying cultural and technical
issues remain complex and pertinent.Leyla and the nanotech she and her partners peddle is a
thought-provoking possibility, while the shadowy group Necdet encounters make
the import of the scientific advancement all the more scary.McDonald seeming to rein himself in, The Dervish House is less evocative than
Riverof Gods or Necroville,
but the backdrop of the Istanbul, the history of Turkey, and the
interrelationship of economics and advanced technology as presented through the
lives of the six characters is explored in entertaining and interesting
detail.It goes without saying, if you
enjoyed McDonald’s other work, it’s difficult for The Dervish House to disappoint.